


Kill 'Em Dead

by fistfight



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 22:59:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3828133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fistfight/pseuds/fistfight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andy is just trying to survive. </p>
<p>As it turns out, so is Patrick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kill 'Em Dead

Andy, despite the circumstances, is sort of happy to be alive right now. Not the right kind of happiness that a twenty three year old should have, out at parties in the middle of the night, but he thinks the lack of dead things and campfire and his two friends are enough. 

Pete’s drinking, and Joe’s kind of eyeing the beer like he wants in on the intoxication too, but other than that, he’s really living in the moment. In a field next to what used to be a busy highway, they’re far away enough from any city that might still have power to see the stars.

But good things never last, Pete sobers up after a couple of hours and Joe looks like he’s gonna fall asleep, so Andy gathers up all their supplies and pushes his friends into the van, leaving the already dying fire to finish itself off. 

He hopes tomorrow will be the same, no death, just subtle contentment.

When he wakes up at - he checks his watch - seven in the morning, to someone running past the van and screaming very obnoxiously in he van’s vicinity, his hopes for a good day are kind of destroyed. 

Joe and Pete wake up too, Joe sitting up slowly and looking around groggily, and Pete jumping to his feet in the back and hitting his head on the roof. 

“What the fuck?” Is the first thing that come’s out of Wentz’s mouth. Andy ignores him.

“Who is that?” mutters Joe, still half asleep.

“Nobody we know,” says Andy, looking out the windshield int the direction he saw the person go. He can make out the figures of two zombies in the distance, but God, that screaming is fucking loud. “Let’s check it out.”

“Wait, I don’t think that’s -” Joe starts, but Andy cut’s him off.

“You’re coming with me. Pete, you can stay here." 

Pete salutes and Joe stumbles to grab a gun and follow Andy out the back doors.

The screaming, which is stopping and starting randomly, seems to be coming from the East, where there’s a small cluster of trees, and doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. Either this is some fucked up trick, or someone needs their help. Andy cocks his gun either way. It’s quiet again when they step through the trees.

Andy sees three figures. All of them look like zombies, covered in blood and very pale, but one looks more animated, maybe one in the middle of transition from alive to dead? He seems to be leading them, either way. Andy raises his gun to point at it, just when it whirls around and punches one of the zombies in the face, breaking off part of it’s decomposing nose.

"Stay quiet,” Andy whispers to Joe, who nods in confirmation.

“Fuck off!” The zombie/person/thing yells hoarsely, kicking the same zombie in the crotch until it falls over. The other zombie has noticed the attack, but it’s met with a punch to the stomach that cuts though it’s decaying flesh and covers it’s attackers fist in bits of organ and blacking blood. The zombie falls but begins crawling towards the one who punched him, along with the zombie that got it’s testicles annihilated earlier.

“Oh my God. Fuck.” The zombie/person/thing says, stumbling away from the approaching zombies. He trips backwards over a tree root or something and lets out a quick scream before falling to the ground. Andy recognizes the annoying sound and fires off a shot through one of the zombie’s heads. Joe gets the other.

“You think he’s infected?” asks Joe, motioning for Andy to follow him to the fallen zombie/person/thing, who is still on the ground but has sat up, and is looking around wildly for whoever has the guns. As soon as he sees Andy and Joe, who have their guns pointed at him, his eye’s widen and he frantically tries to scoot himself away from them.

“Leave me alone, I’m alive, I swear!”

Andy thinks he sounds very alive, but he looks too pale to be someone who’s been roughing it in the outdoors for at least a week.

“Who are you? Are you with someone?” Joe asks, like anyone’s name matters anymore. The latter question still holds significance.

“Please don’t shoot me! I’m sorry, okay? I’m alive!” The guy is sounding more and more frantic, and his wide eyes look like they’re holding back tears.

Joe and Andy are standing directly over him now, guns pointed at his head. “Assuming you’re not lying about the alive part, there’s no reason for us to shoot you.” 

“I’m alive,” The guy says, trying to make his voice strong, even and convincing. “I’m really, very fucking alive.”

“Follow us, then.” says Joe, gently kicking him in the side with his boot. The guy winces but silently obliges.

When they get back to the van, Pete jumps out, looks at the apparently alive guy they’ve dragged back, and sighs.

“Who the fuck is this?”

And that’s how Andy meets Patrick Stump.

-

Patrick is covered in dirt and blood and other things nobody wants to think about, so Andy volunteers to help clean him off, at least marginally. He grabs an expired water bottle (they have a couple of cases for sanitary reasons), a towel, and a packet of Wet Ones, and takes the kid a few meters from the van.

“Alright, kid. Strip.”

“What the hell?”

“Just take off your shirt, alright?”

The kid looks reluctant, but pulls off his long sleeved t shirts, revealing a somewhat clean abdomen, which makes Andy’s job a hell of a lot easier and definitely less awkward. The kid’s ribs are sticking out like he’s lost a lot of weight in a very short amount of time, but Patrick notices his stare and crosses his arms over his stomach like they belong there.

“I can bathe myself.” says the kid, reaching for the towel and bottle of water. 

“I don’t doubt that. I’m here for this,” he says, and holds up the first aid kit.

“I’m fine.” Patrick dampens a towel with the water and starts rubbing at his arms. The pale skin underneath the all the grime creates a stark contrast.

Andy figures this is probably a good time to find out more about this kid. “So where are you from?” he asks, sitting down cross-legged in the grass. 

“Chicago suburbs. Glenview, if you’ve ever heard of it." 

"Pete and Joe are from around there, actually. I’m from Wisconsin. How’d you get out here.”

“I was downtown in the city, about a mile away, with this big group of people trying to create some super community or something. And I stuck around because that’s the easiest way to get supplies. And then, zombies, y’know, happened. And I ran.”

“How long since then?" 

"A couple days.” Patrick is done washing his front side and is now reaching for his back. Andy gets up and takes the towel from him, re-wetting it and cleaning gently. Patrick relaxes into the motions.

“How long were you with them?”

Patrick’s quiet for a second, and Andy realizes those people could have been his friends before they all got killed. “Sorry,” Andy adds.

“It’s fine. About a month. I didn’t really make any friends.”

“That’s too bad.” Andy says, for lack of a better phrase. Patrick shrugs. Andy drops the towel and picks up the wet wipes, throwing them to Patrick. “Wipe off your face with those.”

Underneath drying blood, Patrick’s face is soft and pale, with high cheekbones and barely any stubble. There’s small cuts and scrapes on his cheeks and a bigger scratch running underneath his left eye. The rest of him is similar, bony but soft, with only minor injuries, except for a large bandage wrapped around his forearm Andy didn’t notice before. Patrick unwraps the gauze to reveal a long cut, not very deep, but still stitched up. It doesn’t look infected, but it doesn’t look good, either.

“What’s that from?”

“Knife.” Patrick says, like all he needs to do is prove it’s not from a zombie.

“Why were you cut with a knife?”

“I… It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.” Andy says, moving in with disinfectant and fresh gauze. 

Patrick tells a very fucked up story of a middle aged man in his former group who had some irrational vendetta against him, eventually ending in a fight the man would have won if not for the oncoming zombies.

“You get around.” Andy remarks.

“Eighteen and already lusting for blood, I guess.”

Andy laughs. Patrick, despite their unfortunate meeting, is easy to get along with and Andy hopes Pete and Joe will want him to stick around.

When he shows off the new and improved Patrick to his friends, who are intense game of Go Fish, they seem very impressed.

“Oh my god, he actually is alive,” says Joe. Patrick smiles awkwardly.

Patrick’s still wearing his dirty jeans and shirt, but until they find a river or a city with a working laundromat, he’s stuck with them.

“Thanks.” he says, mostly to Andy, but to the others, too.

Joe deals them in for another round.

-

A month later, Patrick can shoot a gun almost as well as the rest of them and doesn’t just smile shyly when someone makes a joke. They’ve found him a sleeping bag, which is usually set up next to Andy’s, and on colder nights, isn’t set up at all, lying forgotten while it’s owner slides in with the older man.

Patrick is an odd balance of cute and snarky, shying away from compliments but being quick to make a comment when Pete forgets to shave his hair down, and his afro sticks up weirdly after he sleeps, or when Andy chides someone and sounds particularly like a mother.

Sometimes, when he thinks Andy’s asleep, he’ll wrap his arms around him and push his head against him. Whenever they divvy up, more often than not, it’s Patrick and Andy.

And Andy knows, he learned the hard way, that getting too close to someone makes it hurt ten times worse when they’re nor there anymore, but hell, he’d already die for Pete and Joe, so he figures he doesn’t have much to lose either way.

It’s mid afternoon, with warm sun on their backs, and the wind gently blowing through their hair. Patrick and Andy are on top of the van, with their legs dangling off of the side and their hands touching, but not interlocked.

“Don’t hate me for this,” Andy murmurs, as he leans over to kiss Patrick on the cheek. It’s quick and soft, and Andy pulls away and goes back to staring at the clouds traversing the sky like nothing happened.

“I don’t hate you, but I am a little pissed,” says Patrick, who’s still staring forward, “The cliche thing to do is kiss someone on the lips.”

Andy’s head whips towards Patrick at that, and Patrick smiles, that dumb, cute, shy smile like he always used a month ago, and presses his lips onto Andy’s. 

Not that Andy didn’t appreciate Patrick’s lips before, but goddamn. He fucking loves Patrick’s lips.

But, like everything else in their fucked up world, their moment was ruined by zombies. 

A crowd of them, stumbling slowly in the distance.

There’s only dozen of them, actually, nothing too difficult. They jump off the van and get firearms and Joe and Pete. They wait until the zombies are closer to fire any bullets, and Andy waits too long sometimes, and winces when black blood splatters Patrick’s face.

Later, in the van, when Pete’s driving again and Joe’s reading Hemingway, by request of Pete, Andy takes some wet wipes and cleans the blood off Patrick’s face.

“Thanks.” says Patrick. “I didn’t finish before, you know, with the kissing.”

Andy smirks. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> so this is actually from my tumblr but i thought id put it here


End file.
